Regionalism and Revision The Crown and Its Provinces in England, 1200-1650

by Fleming, Peter; Gross, Anthony; Lander, J.R.

• ISBN13: 9781852851576
• ISBN10: 1852851570
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-08-16
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Historians of premodern Europe often think in terms of 'small worlds': a series of regional societies functioning independently of each other. This -approach works well for isolated areas but is less obviously applicable to England, the most centralised country in Europe. How far England was centrally controlled and how far power in reality remained in the localities are key considerations in understanding English history both in the middle ages and after-wards. The essays in "Regionalism and Revision all address these questions, both by analysing how the problem should be approached and by examining what the exercise of power involved in local terms. Did the gentry dominate local office by virtue of their intrinsic importance in their counties or were they dependent for the continuation of their power and wealth on the renewal of their commissions from the central government? How did magnates mediate influence at the centre on behalf of the localities, and how were they repaid for it? How did officials,appointed by the crown, including sheriffs and JPs, react to having to impose unpopular burdens, such as purveyance, upon the counties?

Table of Contents

Preface	vii	(2)
Acknowledgements	ix	(2)
Abbreviations	xi
1 Regionalism and Revision	1	(14)
Anthony Gross
2 The Significance of the Country in English Government	15	(14)
J.R. Lander
3 A Crisis of the Knightly Class? Inheritance and Office among the Gentry of Thirteenth-Century Buckinghamshire	29	(30)
Anne Polden
4 Mid Thirteenth-Century Reformers and the Localities: the Sheriffs of the Baronial Regime, 1258-1261	59	(28)
H.W. Ridgeway
5 The Commons and the Early Justices of the Peace under Edward III	87	(20)
Anthony Verduyn
6 The Dissolution of St Augustine's Abbey and the Creation of the Diocese of Bristol	107	(16)
J.H. Bettey
7 Sir Thomas Cheyne, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, 1536-1558: Central Authority and the Defence of Local Privilege	123	(22)
Peter Fleming
8 Purveyance and Politics in Jacobean Leicestershire	145	(18)
Richard Cust
Index	163